Firehouse Theatre’s latest production of “Preludes” is a trippy musical fantasia that takes viewers on a journey through 19th Century Russian history to dive deep into the music and mind of suffering Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, and the three-year writer’s block, hypnotherapy, and psychological collapse that befalls him after his disaster performance of his debut symphony in 1897.

Playwright and musician Dave Malloy, creator of Broadway hit “Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet of 1812,” has crafted an artistic piece that signifies the musical geniuses of the composer. The musical takes place in Moscow in 1900 in the hypnotized mind of Rachmaninoff, who is experiencing “creative silence” or writer’s block. It is often normal for writers to go through total silence of creative thinking when writing a piece; however, in Malloy’s musical fantasy “Preludes”, the aforementioned writer is able to turn around his years of artistic silence into something great.

“We’re exploring a lot about taking a step forward and on a very basic level of getting out of bed and breaking free of the things that confines and constrains us.” Firehouse Theatre Director Billy Christopher Maupin said of the musical.

In the musical, Rachmaninoff, played by Travis West, is the concert pianist and simultaneously, the musical incorporates a modern-day “RACH”, played by PJ Freebourn, who is paralyzed by writer’s block and constantly wallows in his own self-pity.

“Rach the modern day version, is the central speaking character of the play and the person whose story we’re following,” Maupin said.

Malloy’s way of driving emotion into this piece really makes people empathetic towards his work. His music and lyrics convey authenticity to the characters, situations, and struggles that they find themselves in.

Rounding out the cast is Natalya, played by Isabella Stansbury, who portrays Sergei’s wife, and hypnotherapist Nikolai Dhal, who Sergei visits to recount his terrible writer’s block and sleepless nights at the request of Natalya. Dhal, who was originally written in Malloy’s musical as a man, appears in Firehouse’s Theatre as a woman, played by Georgia Rogers Farmer. Adding to the stellar lineup of actors and actresses is Jody Ashworth, playing famous Russian opera singer Feodor Chaliapin, and RACH’s best friend along with actor Levi Merovich, who takes on several roles in “Preludes” including Rachmaninoff’s favorite composer influences Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Alexander Glazunov, and his main role as “The Master. ”

Meerovich, said his character “The Master” sort of exists “out of time.” According to him, he was able to tap into his own personal creativity to make that character come alive and had free reign artistically to develop him and make the part his own.

“It’s a very interesting part because it’s so vague that you can pretty much do whatever you want,” Meerovich said. “And I make him very much me.” Because I have five other characters who are huge, other varying personalities, but this guy gets to just being me, which is nice.”

Maupin described the musical as “very strange, unconventional and gorgeous. It’s very eclectic in the styles and a lot of the music composed by Rachmaninoff, to which Malloy has added a set melodies and lyrics. In the musical, the audience will experience a menagerie of genres from klezmer to punk rock to Russian folk songs and classical music along with some Indian-inspired music. “Preludes” is orchestrated by a grand piano and two synthesizers despite a bit of electronic music that comes into play. The second synthesizer is played by music director Susan Braden.

“It’s also a little fun and different for me,” said Braden. “This is an incredible piece with a bunch of incredibly talented people here from Richmond that’s gonna knock everybody’s socks off. And it’s strange and wonderful.”

The darker side of children’s fairy tales come to life in a VCU Theater department production of Stephen Sondheim’s Into The Woods, showing now until the end of April, at VCU’s Raymond Hodges Theatre.

Director Kikau Alvaro described the source material, by Sondheim and James Lapine, as a mash-up musical featuring characters from “the Grimm’s Fairy Tales of Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Rapunzel.”

Far from the Disney versions of our childhood, these fairy tales were first known to many as dark, disturbing stories by German brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm–kind of like an early 1800s version of Netflix’s suspense series, Dark.

Fittingly, Alvaro listed another nostalgia-tinged Netflix smash hit as a comparable, saying his production “has a sort of 80’s Stranger Things feel to it. “We were inspired by Stranger Things and also the movie Labyrinth, it helped us build the world and find the aesthetic.” David Bowie’s The Goblin King meets the Duffer Brothers? Yes, please.

The storyline of Into The Woods concerns a childless couple who find themselves cursed by a witch until they can find the four ingredients she needs for her potion. Their apparent triumphs are quickly revealed as actual setbacks, highlighting a central theme of the play; nothing is ever as it initially seems, and many things are simply too good to be true.

The show in all will be broken up into two acts, Alvaro said, describing the first as setting the stage by placing everyone together. In the second act, the magic of fairy tales encounters the harsh reality of the real world.

“In act two we see what happens when fairytales go through real-life events, like the experience of loss, and what happens when something giant unexpectedly comes just when everyone thinks they’re good to go,” Alvaro said.

Runtime is around two hours and thirty minutes for the 27 member cast, and Alvaro said it’s appropriate for all ages despite the darker tones. “This show is kid friendly as well, so we encourage everyone to come along and see it, kids and everyone,” said Alvaro.

Into The Woods shows every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 7:30 PM for the rest of April, with Sunday showings at 3:00 PM.

Tickets range from $10-25 and can be bought online from VCU Theater’s website.

The aviation daredevils of the 1920s and 1930s forms the backdrop for Wings, the latest musical production from Firehouse Theatre. Emily Stilson, a former wing walker who defied death on the wings of a biplane, faces both her mortality and an accompanying language disorder after suffering a stroke.

Kerrigan Sullivan directs the work, adapted from Arthur Kopit’s 1978 play, with a novel visual approach to reflect the fracture between Emily’s mental and physical state.

“We’re exploring this sort of fractured mind, and that was just really, really fascinating to me,” Sullivan said. The performance uses a constantly shifting set, with music and visual changes that mirror Emily’s struggle to recover her voice.

The work takes place in two worlds, depicting both the physical facility that Emily recovers in and the vivid mental space where she relives the daredevil feats of her life as an aviatrix.

“One of the biggest things that I want people to take away is to see that there are other pathways to connection, even when you feel like you are leaving something behind,” Sullivan said. “You are moving toward something, and not necessarily away from it.”

Elens said that with a cast that small they wear a lot of different hats. “We’re all part of the set. We create the environments with our bodies and our voices. The five of us have to really be on our toes.”

As Amy, Emily’s clinical psychologist, Elens is Emily’s connection to her new world, overseeing her from the start of her stroke to her social rehabilitation. “She treats Emily like a human being, not a case study,” Elens said. “It’s about finding that humanity.”

“The biggest thing I’ve taken away from this process so far is whenever my cast comes to talk about different scenes, everyone has a personal attachment to someone in their lives that they’ve lost along the way,” Elens said. “Wings does such a great job of finding all the glorious things that the human brain can do, and all the things that can tear your heart out.”

Though the entire cast is crucial in shaping the on-stage universe, the world of the play is seen through Emily’s eyes.

“It’s a chamber musical,” Bryan said. “It’s telling this huge story but in a very tight, intense, intimate way. It’s almost like you step in as a part of the world.”

The audience sees the stage as Emily does. The voices of doctors, nurses, and Emily herself are sometimes incomprehensible gibberish. The set shifts and fractures, and even the musical refrain reflects the brokenness, beginning as a disjointed overture. It is the world through the lens of someone else’s experience, one that is vastly affected by a tragedy beyond her control.

“It’s an interesting way to see it, because musical theater is so presentational, a way of being able to distance yourself from it a little bit, but it’s inevitable, the story is going to suck you in,” Bryan said. “To think this woman was basically cheating death her whole life, and now she’s had this stroke. It’s her story of how she’s coming to terms with death.”

The play touches on many issues, but Bryan said the most important theme was communication.

“Everyone will have something they can relate to. But I think the whole theme is really just the need and the want to communicate. [Emily] is not able to [communicate] because her speech is impaired and she can’t break across this barrier…I think it’s really just about making that human connection,” Bryan said. “There’s such a level of distraction in our society, but this breaks it down to the core…just communication.”

Firehouse’s community engagement manager Dave Timberline said Wings is a great way to start a conversation. In fact, he is using the production as a launching point to talk about strokes, aphasia, and theater production through Firehouse Forum, which supplements the onstage activity at Firehouse with a wide variety of additional programming.

“I think that this is something that you won’t often see on stage,” Sullivan said. “This is really something different, both in the way the story is told through music and the way that it’s presented on stage. This is going to be something that you don’t want to miss.”

Wings opened at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 15, and runs through March 10. Tickets are $20 which you can purchase here.

“It is a story of a false utopia…where humans are living in a controlled environment based on meeting their most instinctual desires, everyone is essentially conditioned and brainwashed,” said Maggie Roop, Director of Quill Theatre’s Brave New World production, which opened this past weekend. The parallels with our current society are everywhere.

Similar to the book, the play tells of a society that has been neutered through baseline eugenics, pills, promiscuity, and overreliance on technology. In a twist on our current society, childbearing *outside* of a test tube is considered “savage” and base, and any anxiety is masked with a dose of “soma,” the society’s wonder-drug.

Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, was pained by a culture he saw as promiscuous and shallow. He paired these attributes with the ideals of carmaker Henry Ford to craft the society of “Brave New World.” The final product was a strong commentary on capitalist culture, mob rule, and anti-intellectualism.

In this production, two members of “civilization” Bernard Marx and Lenina, take a trip to a “savage compound” that wouldn’t go along with society’s current paradigm. When Bernard and Lenina bring two savages back for “studying,” things go south precipitously.

Michael Oppenheimer, who plays Marx, is a bit of an outsider in his society, questioning the ideology of the world he’s in and abstaining from “some trips” and group activities. Again, it’s hard not to notice the connection between this world and the “resistance” happening in our world.Actress Alex Wiles portrayed Lenina, a middle-class technician who’s known for her beauty and her myriad of lovers. Like Marx, she occasionally appears to question the rules she follows, but unlike Marx, fails to ultimately challenge her society. The meditations on speaking up and not blindly following along come alive beautifully with Wiles and Oppenheimer.

One of Huxley’s points is that the idea of not having an overabundance of convenience essentially makes us less human. “We’re in a phase now where a lot of people are willing to be told what to do, said Roop. Much of Huxley’s commentary, she said, is valid today. “It’s very timely.”

Indeed, in a world where (virtually) everything can be done without leaving home, and “Alexa” is quickly becoming ubiquitous, audience members will find it hard not to see the mirror image in the production.For Roop, the parallels between “Brave New World” and today’s society are abundant, especially our obsession with social media and the rise of fake news and partisan media.“Right now, we’re in a world where we are feeding off information that … isn’t necessarily accurate, and we are people who self-medicate,” she said. Quill Theatre and the Cultural Arts Center at Glen Allen’s “Brave New World” plays now through Feb. 17 at 2880 Mountain Rd.

I looked down at my hands, finally, away from the stage as the play ended — and realized I had crushed my flimsy, disposable cup between my fingers until it was just twisted plastic in my bare hand.

It was this visceral reaction that carried me through Act One and Act Two of Firehouse Theatre’s Desire Under the Elms this past Saturday. Eugene O’ Neill’s 20th-century play is a tale of love, lust, madness, and desperation, and I felt each separate emotion move through me as the story progressed.

Landon Nagel and Amber Martinez were heart-wrenching in their portrayal of Eben and Abbie — the twisted love and chemistry between the two was enough to make the audience audibly gasp, time and time again.

Nagel, in particular, was extraordinarily skilled at slipping from anger and violence, to love and joy as he struggled with his attraction to Abbie, his father’s new wife, and her initial covetousness for the farm that once belonged to his late mother.

Martinez played the manipulative, complicated Abbie effortlessly. There wasn’t a single point in the play where she was an actress playing a character. She was Abbie, even when Abbie lied to her husband, seduced Eben, even when she killed her own child.

The director, Josh Chenard, wanted the audience to not only watch and hear the play, but also to feel it. I can confidently say that he succeeded in doing just that. The insanity, the bitterness, the lust — it was all tangible, it all simmered right at the surface of the story.

Chenard’s decision to move the play from the late 19th century to the Great Depression was highlighted beautifully by the music he chose for the performance. The timeline of events, however, was a bit difficult to follow. Time passed by without any mention in the play — in one scene Abbie had just moved in, and in the next, she was pregnant. These jumps made the play a bit hard to follow at times.

Nevertheless, the raw emotion and the wonderful dynamic between every single character was always present. The relationship between Eben and his gruff father, Ephraim, played passionately by the stately Alan Sader, was strained and fearful.

Eben’s relationship with his two brothers, Peter and Simeon, portrayed by Adam Turck and Chandler Hubbard was also twisted in its own right. Still, the three brothers succeeded in communicating the love between them despite their harsh circumstances.

To be frank, the Firehouse Theatre’s production of Desire Under the Elms is not for the light-hearted. But if you’re looking to experience and feel drama, not just observe it, then this play is worth a watch.

The play still runs through Nov. 5, so you still have some time to check it out. Tickets are $15-$35 (excluding service fees) and you can purchase yours here.

The set is bare-boned, simple, roughly hewn. Soft white lighting pours over actor Adam Turck’s shoulders. As he balances a rake between his hands, he repeats a string of words over and over, perfecting the New England accent that will carry him through Act One: “fuck you, fuck you.”

Looking around, no one but me is giving Turck’s impassioned performance a second glance. There is an easy camaraderie between the actors and crew within the Firehouse Theatre’s black walls. Raucous laughter, shouting voices are constant. Still, there is an underlying intensity, a dedication that is obvious before the actors have even begun playing their parts.

It all fits. Even this simple rehearsal, the cast’s first run-through of the play, it fits – harmonizing perfectly with Eugene O’Neill’s gritty tale, Desire Under the Elms. The play, written originally in 1924, is a raw masterpiece rooted in love, lust, loathing, madness, and murder.

This is O’Neill’s attempt to adapt elements of Greek tragedy, primarily the myth of Phaedra, to a rural New England setting. These themes are as old as time, but Richmond director Josh Chenard is giving a new twist to his own adaptation.

“I moved this play from the original time period in the 1890s to the Great Depression,” Chenard said. “I felt that the themes were better suited aesthetically speaking for the 1930s.”

The powerful emotions and inspirations behind the story, however, remain the same.

“This is a forbidden love story,” Chenard said. “It pulls from the Greeks and their sense of longing, loss, fear, and desperation that is present in so much of their theater.”

Desire Under the Elms is the story of three brothers living on a remote farm – struggling to survive on the land, but living for the beauty of it. When their father, Ephraim Cabot, comes home with a new, young wife named Abbie, the brothers Peter, Eben, and Simeon plot to keep their inheritance.

“The ancient Greeks had no subtext,” Chenard said. “They said exactly what was on their minds. All these strong emotions are right there on the surface, and O’Neill has written the dialogue with such poetry. There’s something about the way he writes that is so rich, so moving.”

And this raw, aching emotion is thick in the air throughout rehearsal. There is nudity, violence, anger, and love bursting at the seams of this piece, but the most remarkable part of Desire Under the Elms is the chemistry between Eben and Abbie.

Landon Nagel, who plays the tragic Eben, struggles with his attraction to Abbie and his loyalty to the land throughout the play. He plays Eben with an earnestness and sadness that draws you in. Amber Martinez, plays Abbie just as skillfully – she is talented enough to make you loathe her and fear her within the first few minutes of the play.

The emotions on stage move very quickly. Nagel thrashes on stage, screams until his face is red, and in the next moment is just as gentle and unsure. His performance is outstanding — albeit without a doubt is extremely challenging in the intensity of his character.

“Eben is broken, he’s caged,” Nagel said. “Not in a way that he is trapped, but in a sorrowful, very painful way. This is a tragic struggle for happiness for him. He feels like an outsider in his own home, he is tied to his past and the death of his mother. And then comes along Abbie, who is dangerous in her own way.”

Chenard, as a directing method, encourages his actors to channel their own personal experiences with emotions such as desperation and love as they play their roles. His hopes for the audience are similar.

“I want the audience to empathize with these characters and their emotions,” he said. “I want them to think about all the times they’ve fallen in love, then out of love. I want them to feel that pain, heartbreak, and loss in death that the characters experience in the play. So often we see and hear theater, but we rarely feel theater.”

Nagel, a Richmond native, also hopes to help the audience feel the rawness of the play, and attributes the starkness of the performance to Chenard.

“I want them to feel the grief, loss, and hope that Eben feels as they watch him,” Nagel said. “There are so many forceful emotions here. With Josh, we get to make the play about what’s expressive and artful, and see how far we can push the envelope on these emotions. We let go of what it should be and just let it be what it is.”

Jane Mattingly, the dramaturg of Desire Under the Elms, also emphasized the connections she anticipates the audience will make with the play, soon to be open to all audiences.

“This story is special in its timelessness,” she said. “Home, family, lonesomeness, desperation – it’s all familiar. You go to {the} theater to feel connected to things, and to the characters on stage. That’s what this is all about.”

Preview of Desire Under the Elms takes place this Fri., Oct. 20, and runs through Sun., Nov. 5. Tickets range from $15-$35 and can be purchased here.